Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence by Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart E. Tolnay (review)

Bailey and Tolnay’s book is a landmark contribution to the literature about lynching. The authors’ goal is to address the “almost total ignorance of the personal characteristics . . . of the thousands of victims of southern mob violence” (xii), which they accomplish through meticulous work matching known lynching victims to their individual archival records.

The book begins with a concise and useful review of previous research, both sociological and historical. The authors’ summary of major theoretical perspectives allows them to situate their study within the existing literature and to highlight their new approach. One of the book’s strengths is its extensive explanation of the record-linkage process by which the authors matched the victims of lynching to personal and household census records—supplemented, when possible, by other documents. Bailey and Tolnay note that this “comprehensive account” allows readers to assess the strength of their evidence (33), provides a guide for future researchers, and highlights the intrinsic interest of the research process, which they describe as “forensic social science” (34). This chapter is a model of clarity, displaying the authors’ reasoning at each critical juncture, describing sources and decisions, and providing detailed descriptions of various difficulties and their resolution. Bailey and Tolnay successfully matched 42.3 percent of the 2,164 victims for whom they searched (56), thus creating the first database to have extensive demographic information about numerous lynching victims. This detailed and time-consuming research lays the foundation for the analysis to follow.

Bailey and Tolnay begin their analysis with a chapter providing a detailed profile of the characteristics of African-American males who were and those who were not victims of lynching in the counties and years under study. The authors used Public Use Microdata Samples from the census to construct a comparison sample of African-American men who were not victims of lynching, thus allowing them to “describe simple differences between the characteristics of victims and non-victims,” as well as to “model the likelihood of being lynched as a function of various combinations of individual, household, and contextual characteristics” (59).

Building on this chapter, Bailey and Tolnay use statistical analysis to test two principal theoretical explanations of lynching. First, they examine whether lynching victims were more likely to be marginal in some way than non-victims, and thus more vulnerable to mob attack. They next test the opposing theoretical perspective that victims were targeted due to their success. In the following chapter, the authors refine and expand this analysis by testing the effects of local economic, political, and religious context on the likelihood of becoming a victim of lynching. Their findings are not easy to summarize succinctly, because the influence of local context forces any conclusions about the influence of “social marginality and social standing on the likelihood of victimization” to be “nuanced rather than simple” (210). Bailey and Tolnay did find that African-American men whose characteristics made them stand out from the local African-American population were at higher risk of becoming victims of lynching.

The overwhelming majority of victims of lynching in the ten southern states covered by this study were African-American men. Only this category of victims was numerous enough to allow for extensive statistical analysis, although the book includes an interesting chapter profiling lynching victims who were women or white men. The final chapter, which reviews the findings of the book, suggests lines of inquiry for future research. The book is supplemented with a website that makes the authors’ data available upon registration (the url has changed since publication to http://lynching.csde.washington.edu/#/home). Access to these data will be highly useful for historians and for social scientists.

Bailey and Tolnay make creative use of data that have become more accessible recently because of technological advances, offering valuable new insights about mob violence. Their book certainly moves the state of research on lynching to a new level. All future...